At Forrester we get a lot of questions about the use of social technology within the enterprise.IT organizations are trying to uncover successful ways to apply social technology for their business customers – looking for the new solution will be the “Facebook for the enterprise”. We also know that many technology companies think this will be a crucial development in the market:a recent survey indicated that 74% of technology marketers and strategists believe web 2.0 tools will be important or very important to their business strategy over the next 1-3 years.

I personally believe that innovation tools have the best potential in the application of social technologies within businesses.What is innovation if not the ability to source ideas from disparate sources, manage those ideas through a commercial development process, and evaluate their success?

At its green summit event last week, IBM brought together a powerful collection of vendor partners to address customers' sustainability challenges and opportunities. The Green Sigma Coalition is notably different from other vendor partnerships in the green IT space, for three reasons:

EMC continues to tease the market with its management software ambitions, taking another step this week to build on its portfolio. On May 27, EMC announced its intent to acquire Configuresoft, a vendor of server configuration and change management (CCM) software. Forrester views this as a positive development for both companies but we eagerly await more.

While EMC must still make additional developmental moves to graduate into the “anchor” class of management vendors, its M&A activity has proven it is a formidable player in configuration and change management across a number of technology domains. Obviously, EMC has strength in storage, but it has also become a key vendor in the network domain with its Smarts (2005) and Voyence (2007) acquisitions, and its purchase of nLayers (2006) gives it some of the best visibility into the application domain. Servers have been a notable gap even though some good “skunk works” monitoring technology was developed within its Smarts team. Server CCM was one big domain missing from the portfolio.

I just received preliminary results back from my 2009 strategy professional survey, which is an annual survey of senior level technology marketers, strategists (people with “strategy” in their title) and C-level executives. This year, I decided to focus a good portion of the survey on the effects of the recession…My sense is that after the tech industry underwent a period of shock at the beginning of the year, conditions have stabilized, and tech companies have incorporated the marco-economic conditions into their strategy.We have 112 responses so far, but this may increase if we keep it in the field.

Recently, I was invited to attend an analyst briefing event at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY to hear about their new Business Analytics and Optimization service line. The company is quite excited about this new service line, which they describe as one designed to use analytics to help companies “improve the speed and quality of business decisions.” They cite some underlying drivers of demand – like the fact that many business leaders say they don’t have enough information to make business decisions, or that many business decisions are based on gut feel – as pointing to the fact that more customers will look to IBM for a quantitative, data-driven analysis of their business situation and options.

Overall, I was impressed. I had a very nice lunch with Fred Balboni (the service line leader) in which, in addition to discussing his ambitious cycling regimen, he explained why the new service line is both important to the market, and consistent with IBMs existing capabilities. The company claims that while the service line is new, they have been doing projects in this area for quite a while as part of their services work.

I get this question all the time because, let’s face it, it’s a significant decision. For example, an Enterprise Agreement (EA) renewal for an enterprise with the main desktop suite on, say, 10,000 PCs could cost around $1,500,000 per year. So what do you get for this outlay? You’ve already purchased a perpetual license for the relevant Microsoft products via your original EA, so the renewal is merely an extension of the maintenance element, which Microsoft calls Software Assurance (SA). Like most terms in Microsoft licensing, SA looks like an industry standard concept, but has sufficient Microsoft-specific nuances that confuses customers. The key differences from most vendors’ software maintenance offerings are that SA:

Is not tied to product support. Customers that aren’t paying SA still get access to patches, and can purchase additional support services from Microsoft or its partners on a time & materials basis.

Delivers upgrade rights that live on after the agreement expires. Customers earn rights to any version that Microsoft releases while they are on SA. So, for example, a customer paying SA on Microsoft Office for the next 12 months will earn the right to the next version, Office 14, due out at the end of 2009, even if it doesn’t intend to actually upgrade to that version for another 3 or 4 years

Includes many additional benefits that, though hard to value, are far from worthless. For example, the extra training, online e-learning and rights to use the same version on a home PC will certainly translate to more effective use of the software and enhanced user productivity, but it's very hard to give that a dollar value.

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If there is one other research company that we've continued to encounter, respect, and see as real competition in the interactive media space, it is JupiterResearch. While the company ownership has changed hands several times over the years, the analysts have continued to do great work.

That's why we're very pleased that Forrester Research today announced it is acquiring JupiterResearch.